Novel software can protect your laptop, even when it’s asleep

Toronto, Nov 25 (IANS) Researchers have designed a new software that can safeguard data even when the computer is in sleep mode.

The powerful new software — Hypnoguard — was designed to protect “data-in-sleep”.

“Protecting data is especially difficult when a computer goes to sleep, which happens when a laptop’s lid is closed, or after a certain period of user inactivity,” said Lianying Zhao, a doctoral student at Concordia University in Quebec, Canada.

If a computer in this mode falls into the wrong hands, a malicious person can extract the data found in the machine’s random-access memory (RAM) in a number of technical ways, the researchers said.

Once installed, Hypnoguard encrypts the computer’s RAM before it enters sleep mode, and then decrypts the data upon waking with hardware-backed uncircumventible user re-authentication.

Hypnoguard was designed by carefully integrating password-based authentication with widely available hardware security features in modern consumer-grade computers, the researchers noted.